


Sticks and stones might break your bones

by Cuits



Category: Pitch (TV 2016)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-25
Updated: 2016-12-25
Packaged: 2018-09-08 08:43:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8838004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cuits/pseuds/Cuits
Summary: Five times words hurt more.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jimmytiberius](https://archiveofourown.org/users/jimmytiberius/gifts).



**You are just a stupid girl.**

The air smells like dust and an upcoming storm as she marches to the mount. 

Her hair pulled tight on a small bun under her cap makes if difficult to tell that she is a twelve year old girl and not a boy from a distance. She is not much slimmer than her teammates, not much shorter, certainly not worse at this game than any them and she convinces herself that that is all that matters.

She gets in position and takes a look at the signal of the catcher and acknowledges it with a curt nod, concentrates and successfully throws the ball. 

It’s a strike.

All around the field, parents cheer loudly and shout encouragements although not for her. Her father never cheers, never celebrates until the very end if at all, never loses the appearance that this is more than a game — it’s a business, a way of living, a future. 

Something serious.

Ginny breathes deeply. Her hands are sweaty. Her teammates look expectantly at her from the bench, she can make out some of them with their finger crossed and she cleans her palms on her pants, forces the nervousness out of her system. The catcher makes the signal and she cringes. It’s not the ball she would have chosen. 

She looks at the batter as he ceremoniously airs the bat, soaked in his own sweat, his gaze full of hate as he fixes his eyes on her. Good. If he is looking at her he is not concentrating on the ball.

Ginny makes white noise of the voices that claim to be heard and throws the ball again as the catcher indicated.

It is a second strike.

Hundreds of eyes are focussed on her and she feels the weight of every single one and so she shrugs trying to lift it off her shoulders. 

Coach has promised them crazy amounts of fast food in the arcade if they make it to the Little League playoffs and they are currently just an strike away from that. Maybe her father will let her go this time and she’ll be able to hang out with her teammates and throw fries at each others over the table like any other group of friends. They don’t really mind that she is a girl, they like baseball and they like to win and they all have that in common. Ginny is sure they could really be friends if her father would let her hang out with them occasionally, if she weren’t so busy training.

The catcher makes the sign and she rolls her eyes but complies. The batter swings with force the air as the ball she throws reaches the catcher untouched. This is it! They’ve made it to the playoffs!

Her teammates run towards her and she smiles and laughs as they hug her, shove her around affectionately, pat her back and swing her cap. She searches the benches for her father and when her eyes find him she waves and smiles broadly. He doesn’t smile but nods at her with his arms crossed over his chest and she convinces herself that that is enough.

The Coach approaches the huggin group and one by one he high-five’s each and every single one of them as he speaks big words about hard work and great games but something catches her attention at the edge of her vision field. She turns her head directing her gaze to the last batter of the other team. The boy is alone, looking intently at his feet as he kicks the empty, dusty field. There is something about him that makes her stop smiling — a sort of recognition. She can tell just by looking at him that he feels the same mix of frustration, disappointment and loneliness that is engraved in her bones, like she can see herself mirrored in this strange boy.

Ginny disengages herself from her team to step aside and walk towards him with a shy, warm smile on her lips and stops a couple of feet away from him.

“You did a good job,” she says extending her arm in a peace offering. “I guess we were luckier.” 

They were also better, but she doesn’t say it. The boy lifts his watery gaze to look at her in the eye and she smiles a little broader at him, the way she would have liked that someone would have done for her in the endless evenings of training in which she didn’t manage to throw as she was supposed to.

“Shut up!” He shouts suddenly and Ginny barely manages to refrain from jumping back startled. “You are just a stupid girl.”

It’s not the first time she hears the words, but it’s the first time that they cut her so deeply. She doesn’t answer though, doesn’t throw an insult back, doesn’t even say that he is just a sore loser. She is too hurt to use words.

She runs away and tries not to cry, mingles in the happy crowd that makes her team and tries to join the celebration but feels terribly cold inside, as if something inside herself had broken and she didn’t know how to fix it.

“What is wrong?” asks her father later, when they are in the car and she is intently looking the landscape of middle-class houses pass by her window. His voice sounds vaguely annoyed and almost worried. She instantly resents him for asking.

“Nothing,” she says. She doesn’t need the lecture that would surely come about how she has to toughen up if she were to speak about the boy in the field, so she concentrates, as she does when she is playing, she focuses on the street, the passing trees, the occasional passerby and ignores everything else, ignores the sharp pain inside herself willing her to disappear. 

Ginny makes the resolution that she won’t let anyone have the satisfaction of knowing how fragile she is.

 

**Yeah, what's up with you, Baker? Are you on your period or something?**

The fluorescent light of the locker room flicks incessantly in the most unnerving pattern and Ginny pays her frustration with the stupid thing throwing at it every damn piece of cloth that she takes off before putting them all in her bag.

The room stinks f sweat, liniment and far too much Axe as it always does when she enters to change her clothes after the boys have left the place. The cold sweat on her skin makes her feel itchy in all the wrong ways.

It has been a bad game, _she_ has played a bad game and if years haven’t made boys be more gracious about losing to a girl, they have certainly made them meaner when they think they have an excuse. They are like a dog with a bone when she has a bad day, as if it wasn’t already enough to lose to a team that is not better than them.

She is sixteen and she has already given up on trying to make friends of teammates and she can’t even blame it on having the wrong set of genitalia. Ginny is around teenage boys enough to listen them talk about girls in all sort of manners, has heard the longing in their voices as they praise their eyes, their mouth or their soft touch, has been surprised at the hungry frustration for girls that don't pay them enough attention, and the violent, vicious discourses when they have been rejected — but underneath all those words there was always a lingering, general want that has never been directed towards her.

Down to her sports bra and panties, she looks at her reflection on the mirror and tries to figure out what is wrong, what is so terrible about herself that makes her this hard to be desired.

She doesn’t find the answer — she never does.

Her teammates don’t treat her like a girl but they don’t treat her like a boy either and that somehow makes it all worse. It makes her invisible. She makes fists of her hands and swears that they will see her, they will make them see her when she plays among the best.

When she comes out of the locker room there is still a small group of boys loitering around with their sports bags hanging loose from their shoulders. They are talking to a couple of girls her age that look vaguely amused, and the whole scene reminds Ginny of a documentary about scavengers that she watched once in third grade.

She walks silently past them but refuses to look down, and it’s the annoying sound of someone making a distasteful sound at her that makes her roll her eyes and turn around.

“Yo, where are you going so quickly?” asks Evans smiling like a hyena. “You should be properly apologizing to us for the game you’ve made us lose.”

She is about to comment on the games they usually win thanks to her when one of her teammates takes a couple of steps towards her with his head high and his arms crossed over his chest, as if she was someone who could be intimidated by his pathetic muscular tone.

“Yeah, what's up with you, Baker? Are you on your period or something?” He mocks her as he laughs as if what he had just said was the most funny, most imaginative, negative comment ever made by a man walking the Earth, and for some reason it flicks a switch inside her. A switch that seems to be in charge of her mean right hook, apparently.

Her fist connects with his face and she falls on his ass, both of his hands going to his face under the stupefied look of the rest of the group.

The terrified look on his face as he looks at his own hands and see them smeared with blood is almost too comical for her not to laugh.

“What’s up with you, _boy_?” She spits the last word as if it was the impurest curse of a long lost religion. “Are you afraid of a little blood?”

She doesn’t wait for an answer, the silent inaction won’t last a lot longer.

Ginny grabs the strap of her sports bag so hard that the knuckles of both her hands go white, but at least this way she can keep her fingers from trembling. She turns around once again and resumes her walk towards the parking lot where her father waits for her. 

 

**It is her fault. That girl is a distraction.**

Her making it to the Minor League comes like a dream disguised as a nightmare — or maybe the other way around. 

Her father dies and she is left alone in uncharted territories with such a low income that money start to be a family problem. 

For the first time in her life since she can remember she wonders what will happen if she doesn’t make it, what if without her father’s guidance she has reached the peak of her sports career and it is not enough to make a living out of it. 

She is scared and she has no one to turn around for a good piece of advice.

She doesn’t know what to do but her brother steps in and helps her get a couple of sponsors to keep the boat afloat and a shitty job at a sport’s store to keep her going in the off season. And she keeps training, because that is what she does, she keeps training every single day, while the sadness and the loneliness makes her want to scream until her lungs burn.

The guys — the other players — treat her like a mascot, like this curiosity that helps sell t-shirts to little girls and will never make it to the Major league. They don’t see her as as a threat to their career but as a joke, a publicity stunt or an easy lay.

Some women look at her warily. Girlfriends, spouses, mothers. They sit on the stands and follow her with their angry gazes burning holes in her back. Ginny squares her jaw and keeps her eyes on the field ahead.

From time to time, the training gets messy, tense, but she doesn’t let it get to her. She works hard, trains hard and on a good day, manages to strike out most of her teammates.

“It is her fault. That girl is a distraction.”

It’s not the first time she hears the argument, nor is it the first time for her coach. She is used to hear it from angry fathers and losing teams but this time the words belong to a young girl that looks like her a couple of years ago and for some reason it gets to her.

She feels a crushing loneliness. The blatant contempt in the girl’s words is a hard pill to swallow but the training is over and the guys are still using the locker room so she doesn’t have anywhere to go. She sits in the dugout and lowers her cap, making herself a little less visible to the world. A little less vulnerable, if she is lucky.

“Hey, you, Girly. Leave the coach alone. If your brother gets that easily distracted maybe he should be on ADHD medication.”

Ginny consistently tries to get as far away of this kind of conversations as possible but she can’t help take a look and that is when she sees a young woman with an undeniable  
no-nonsense demeanor and a toddler on each hand walking her way.

“Hi, I’m Evelyn Sanders”, she says. She doesn’t offer her a hand but offers her a warm smile that Ginny didn’t know she was craving for.

“Hi. And ummm… thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. You were pitching great and my husband only says good things about you —” she doesn’t say it with any kind of aggravation, “ — and if you like kids I think we are gonna be good friends.”

If Ginny’s past experience serves, good intentions have a tendency to drift away soon enough, when the inconvenience of being on her side outbalances the sense of self-complacent; but for now, this woman’s kind smile as she offers her one of her kids for her to play with is a much needed breath of fresh air.

 

**Who do you think you are?**

Amelia had told her the news the week before. She had invited her to dinner at some restaurant that could even look like a posh place if she squinted and very calmly explained to her that there had been some talks about putting her in the Major League.

“It’s nothing more than a consistent interest for now but this is it, Ginny. This is going to be it.” 

She takes a deep breath and doesn’t smile. “Okay,” she says, and then she proceeds to concentrate on enjoying her fabulous steak.

There is a delicate balance in what seems to be the appropriate reaction to that kind of information —something between freaking out and dismissing the still non-news entirely — that seems too difficult to grasp. Ginny measures the inner voice of her dad and the exultant smile of her manager and figures they cancel each other so she chooses not to react.

She plays, she works out, she doesn’t let her hopes rise up. If she feels a little out of her depth at imagining the possibilities of how huge this could turn out to be, well, there is no one beside her who knows her well enough to guess as much. Not since the Sanders left for San Diego right after his brother decided he was not a good manager, anyway. Her corner feels a little too uncrowded as of late.

She focuses on her routine, on the familiar weight of a baseball ball in her hand and the idle talk of her playmates in the dugout, until one day Amelia’s excitement is uncontainable and palpable from the grades as she finishes her last inning and Ginny somehow knows.

Social networks and internet blogs are close behind.

“So right now, the most important thing is to control the news cycle,” Amelia explain to her as she changes clothes in the apparel room. “Don’t talk to any reporter. The MLB and myself will handle them for now.”

Amelia is enjoying it. She barely knows her but she can tell by the brightness in her eyes, and all that Ginny can think about in a detached unreal way is that someone, someday will probably carry around her rookie card for luck the way she carries Mike Lawson’s. 

She is in shock. She almost feels afraid to openly smile in case it might all dissolve into thin air, leaving her heartbroken and a fool, but as soon as she opens the room’s door, a human wall dressed in San Antonio’s dark blue keeps her from actually stepping out.

“Who do you think you are?!” Alder’s voice is raspy with barely contained anger and his index fingers points at her in a way that makes all Ginny’s muscles tense.

His face is red and distorted and she knows his ire should give her pause, should scare her, but this kind of violence has become so ingrained in some aspects of her life that she automatically reacts.

“Someone who is better at this game than you,” she answers with comptent, her chin high and defiant.

She has come to expect this from guys like Alder, who like to think of themselves as kind and nice as long as their entitled asses are not denied anything they think belong to them by divine nature or whatever. He shows his ugly, meninist, stupid and true face and Ginny comes out of her stupor.

This is happening, this is really happening for her. She smiles and chuckles. She can simultaneously feel Amelia stepping up to her side and her soon to be former teammate take a deep angry breath.

“They just want you to sell some extra tickets and pink t-shirts.”

She rolls her eyes. It’s funny how selling more only sounds like an insult when they spit the accusation to _a girl_.

“Yeah, well, they don't want you at all,” Amelia says surprising them both. She crosses her arms over her chest and takes another step ahead getting into Adler’s space. “Not even to cut the field grass so…”

Ginny is not used to anybody helping her fight her battles, especially not the petty ones, so when Adler finally disappears, she turns towards her agent and releases a deep breath, letting herself show a sincere smile of gratitude.

“Thanks for that.”

Amelia nods and smiles and Ginny thinks for the first time that she is really gonna make it.

 

**So, when do I get a peek of that Baker’s sweet ass?**

Her designated changing room at the clubhouse is nothing fancy and yet as a person who has spent most of her life changing clothes in broom closets or cars, mastering the skill of keeping an acceptable level of hygiene after games out of scarce cold showers and wipe tissues, the former storeroom feels like a class A luxury.

There is of course the little detail about sharing vent tubes with the guys, which makes their “locker room talks” perfectly accessible to her hears. She tries not to pry and even feels a little guilty when she is washing her face or using the mirror and accidentally catches part of conversations not intended for her to hear, yet she has so many disadvantages just for being who she is that she figures she can take this little architectonic mishap as a tiny karmic payback.

It is mostly idle talk, banter or the occasional rant about a woman with a lot of “bro” and “dude” interjected. Not this time though. The newest rookie is a guy from Atlanta with more bravado than skills and maybe a golden future if he ever gets to develop his potential. He is also a big-time jerk and Ginny has probably exchanged a total of ten words with him before she hears his voice filling her change room as he gets out of her uniform.

“So, when do I get a peak of that Baker’s sweet ass? I mean for real, does she walks around in tiny towels anytime?”

The words aren't new, they never are, and it enrages her that they still hold the power to make her stomach drop even if she has mastered how not to let it show on her face. She throws her worn cleats to the floor and holds her breath when she realizes that there is absolute silence coming from the other end of the vents. No laughs, no jokes, nothing for at least a whole minute. 

She is not sure what to expect.

Ginny goes to the sink and grabs the countertop hard, stretching her neck as if that could make any difference about the lack of significant sounds coming from the boys until Lawson’s voice almost makes her jump out of her skin.

“Okay, you are new here so we are going to teach you some ground rules.” His tone is a little too strained to be purely conversational. “First, the only sweet ass we discuss around here is mine, because I’m the captain and because I have a superb ass.” 

There is some loud, unconcrete agreement mixed with laughs coming from the rest of the guys and Ginny breaths deeply, loosening the tight muscles of her shoulders and arms.

“Second, I don’t know which shithole of a club you come from and I don’t really care. I don’t care what is your damage or what you do out of here as long as it doesn’t reflect back badly on this club or this team.”

She can make out Lawson’s expression with her mind’s eye, the contained smile that has nothing joyful about it, the hard vertical lines in his forehead as he frowns and his overall studied relaxed posture. She briefly reflects back upon the first time she heard her capitain talk through the air vents and the joke at her expense. She wonders if this other kind of reaction makes her more or less like one of the guys.

“And one last thing,” Mike’s voice comes like a loud, forced whisper and Ginny imagines he is in the rookie’s face trying to prove a point and make a veiled, subtle threat at the same time. “If you ever disrespect a teammate like that again, somebody is going to take on teaching you a lesson the hard way.”

“Damn right!” Blip interjects. The rest of the guys barely audible in the background, probably already out of the showers and tired of the gratuitous drama. 

“And I won’t care about that either.”

She would have liked to have the chance to stand for herself, to look at this guy in the eye and issue a less delicate kind of speech with probably more swearing involved, but she will never have it. Guys like the rookie would never say those words to her face, not in that tone, not in the changing room.

Ginny will never be one of the guys for the pure, simple reason that she isn’t a guy. _Teammate_ , is what Lawson has said, and yes, she can certainly live with that.


End file.
